Police have restrained the use of assets worth about Rs. 70 million belonging to a man arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, alleging the property was built with the proceeds of narcotics trafficking, NewsFirst reported on Thursday.

The frozen assets are a two-storey house in the Madagal area of Jaffna and approximately Rs. 15 million already held in the custody of the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court. The suspension order took effect on Thursday and runs for 14 days.

What the order is built on

The restraint follows an operation carried out on 31 August by officers of the Police Special Task Force in Jaffna, in which five suspects were arrested over the possession of Rs. 15 million in cash.

Investigators have since identified the owner of the Madagal property as the sixth suspect in the same case, and allege the house was constructed using money generated by an illegal narcotics trafficking operation.

The arithmetic is worth stating plainly, because the headline figure bundles two different things. The Rs. 15 million in court custody is the cash seized in August. If the total restrained is about Rs. 70 million, the house accounts for roughly Rs. 55 million of it — the great majority of the figure, and the only part that rests on an allegation about how it was paid for rather than on money already in official hands.

Madagal has come up before

Madagal is not an incidental location in Sri Lankan narcotics enforcement.

On 27 September, the Navy seized 81kg of heroin and ICE along with a boat in a pre-dawn operation on the Kusumanthurai coast at Madagal — a haul the Deputy Defence Minister valued at Rs. 1.5 billion and called the largest taken on the northern coast in recent history, as this desk reported at the time.

Nothing in Thursday’s filing links the two. The August arrests predate the September seizure by four weeks, and NewsFirst reports no connection between the cases. But the same small stretch of the Jaffna coast has now produced a billion-rupee maritime interception and a house that police say was financed by trafficking, and that is a fact about the place worth recording even where the files are separate.

A near-miss worth flagging

“Rs. 70 million” is a figure that recurs in this area of enforcement, and two unrelated matters carrying it are live at once.

A three-storey house at Kavanthispura, Embilipitiya, on just over an acre of land and also valued at around Rs. 70 million, was restrained under the same Act in early September over alleged narcotics proceeds. Separately, the Rs. 70 million Krrish matter before the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court is a bribery case involving Namal Rajapaksa and has nothing to do with narcotics. Neither is this case. The discriminators here are Madagal, Jaffna, the 31 August STF operation and the sixth suspect.

Not reported

NewsFirst does not name the suspect or any of the five arrested in August, and does not say which authority issued the suspension order or under which section of the Act. It does not say whether the sixth suspect has been arrested, produced in court or charged, or whether he was among those detained on 31 August.

No valuation method is given for the house, and the filing does not say who valued it or when. It does not report what happens at the end of the 14 days — whether police will seek an extension, a forfeiture order or a confiscation — nor whether the five August suspects remain in custody or have been bailed.

The 31 August STF operation itself does not appear in this desk’s archive, and no verified outlet’s contemporaneous account of it could be retrieved; the details above are as NewsFirst reports them.

This report rests on a single verified newsroom. Searches across the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing, Hiru News, Daily FT, the Island and Colombo Gazette returned no other verified outlet’s account of the restraint order at the time of writing, and Ada Derana has been unreachable from this desk for twenty-seven consecutive days.

Sources: NewsFirst.